Politics to Pop Culture, 1990's

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The 1990s was a decade of extremes and contradictions. Americans built bigger and more elaborate homes and drove more expensive automobiles, then worked longer hours to pay for them. Americans spent more, borrowed more, and went more deeply into debt. They drank more coffee, smoked more cigars, and turned gambling into a national pastime. Children struggled to deal with the pressures of the adult world to which they were increasingly exposed, and many were forced to adjust to new step-families

The invasion of Kuwait by 140,000 Iraqi troops and 1,800 tanks on 2 August 1990, eventually led to U.S. involvement in war in the Persian Gulf region. Instead of repaying billions of dollars of loans received from Kuwait during the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq (1980–1988), Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein resurrected old territorial claims and annexed Kuwait as his country's nineteenth province.

The 1990s was a time of such tumult and confusion as far as the Internet was concerned that no one could agree on what was happening, let alone about what the future was likely to bring. Since 1994, when the World Wide Web made the Internet more accessible, all the formerly immutable truths about business have been called into question

During the 1990s a proliferation of extremist and militant activities emerged, ranging from Ku Klux Klan marches to murders and bombings. Tens of thousands of Americans joined various antigovernment and hate groups. Early in the decade right-wing domestic terrorism rose to a level not seen since the activities of left-wing student radicals and militants of the late 1960s and early 1970s. There were about five hundred active militia groups across the country, some with only a few members and others with thousands.

By early 1993, Windows was selling at the rate of one million copies a month. The second part of Microsoft's one-two punch was the company's manufacturing of application software to take advantage of its hugely successful operating system, with Microsoft's Excel program claiming 73 percent of the $756 million Windows spreadsheet market, and Microsoft Word commanding 53 percent of the Windows word-processing market by the late 1990s.

When he was elected president in 1992, he was the youngest American president since John F. Kennedy, and when he completed his second term in office in 2001 he became the youngest ex-president since Theodore Roosevelt.

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The United States economy grew by an average of 4 percent per year between 1992 and 1999. (Since 2001, it’s never grown by as much as 4 percent, and since 2005 not even by 3 percent for a whole year.) An average of 1.7 million jobs a year were added to the American work force, versus around 850,000 a year during this century so far.

1992 Climate again becomes issue in the Presidential race, with Bill Clinton saying "our addiction to fossil fuels … is wrapping the earth in a deadly shroud of greenhouse gases" and urging Bush to commit the U.S. to a treaty on global warming.

g back to a decade ago, there was a high level of anxiety in the air. Through the last wintry months of 1999, people didn’t really know what to expect. Would missiles begin a “War Games” chain of events between Russia and the United States? Would planes fall from the sky? Would everything on my computer be erased, gone forever?